Daily 5 - Day 191

Today's Daily 5:

1. Jeans at work today
2. Subway for lunch with a coworker
3. Got pretty much all of my books boxed and ready to move tomorrow
4. Clean sheets and pajamas tonight
5. Feeling like I'm actually making headway with this move
6. Watching the Olympics while I packed and worked on my "to do" list for the evening
7. So nice after boxing the books to settle in to a bowl of left-over pasta
8. Had the house to myself tonight
9. 191 days of daily 5 lists
10. It's the weekend!

Feeling Slightly Vindicated

This article in the Calgary Herald this morning has left me feeling somewhat vindicated.  I've been having billing issues with Enmax for 8 months now, have called them on a monthly basis, and there is still no resolution.  Twice now, they've submitted the resolution request, but submitted it with the wrong information, leading nowhere.  There's nothing like good customer service!  Let's just say that the next time I move (I cancelled my utilities for this move, since I won't need them at Grandma's) I won't be setting up my utility account with Enmax.

The Table - Henri Nouwen

Earlier this week I shared a few thoughts from Henri Nouwen on the significance of meals, and gathering around a table together.  Here are a few more:

The Barometer of Our Lives


Although the table is a place for intimacy, we all know how easily it can become a place of distance, hostility, and even hatred. Precisely because the table is meant to be an intimate place, it easily becomes the place we experience the absence of intimacy. The table reveals the tensions among us. When husband and wife don't talk to each other, when a child refuses to eat, when brothers and sisters bicker, when there are tense silences, then the table becomes hell, the place we least want to be.

The table is the barometer of family and community life. Let's do everything possible to make the table the place to celebrate intimacy.

Creating Beautiful Memories


What happens during meals shapes a large part of our memories. As we grow older we forget many things, but we mostly remember the Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners in our families. We remember them with joy and gratitude or with sadness and anger. They remind us of the peace that existed in our homes or the conflicts that never seemed to get resolved. These special moments around the table stand out as vivid reminders of the quality of our lives together.

Today fast-food services and TV dinners have made common meals less and less central. But what will there be to remember when we no longer come together around the table to share a meal? Maybe we will have fewer painful memories, but will we have any joyful ones? Can we make the table a hospitable place, inviting us to kindness, gentleness, joy, and peace and creating beautiful memories?

Almost Weekend

Something about this Garfield cartoon that arrived in my inbox this morning made me laugh.  Maybe because it's definitely been the sort of week where I've spent more hours awake than asleep.

House church went late last night, and when you don't have a vehicle, it means you stay until the people who drove you are also leaving.  Which means I got home after 11.  And that I then dealt with the usual sleep issues.

It was a bit of a rough night again.

Thankfully today will be a pretty laid back day at work.

But I'll be busy tonight.

Tonight is the night for packing my books, and my "altar spaces".  I own probably somewhere around 2000 books.  The altar spaces are simply prayerful reminders, scattered around my bedroom.  With all of those things packed, the transition will truly become real.  For the next week I'll live in a relatively empty space.  It's a little bit crazy to consider, really.

I'm just not entirely certain yet how to process the fact that a week from tomorrow I'll be vacating the apartment that I've loved, in the neighborhood that I've loved, with the roommate I've loved, and moving into my Grandma's basement.  It's not exactly what one would consider an "upwardly mobile" relocation.  Not that I've ever been all that concerned with being upwardly mobile, but I guess some part of me is struggling with that move.  With the fact that, at nearly 27 years of age, for at least the next six months, when asked where I live, the answer will be, "with my Grandma".

I need to write out some thoughts on this move.  I have lots to share.

But for the moment, I'm thinking about tonight.  About packing my books, and all those precious little things that truly make my bedroom a prayerful space.  That make it home.  I'm thinking about the next week lived in transition.  I'm wondering how to make the new space cozy.  I'm considering details like whether or not I need to recruit a few more people to help with the move, how I need to list my couch and loveseat on kijiji, the fact that I definitely need some new audiobooks since my commute is about to become even longer, whether I can work in moving a few more loads of things to Grandma's during the evenings next week, the process of packing our kitchen, and cleaning the apartment, and then the exhale, of doing the process in reverse, unpacking, and creating peace and space and home again.

This is the fourth time I've moved in 3 and a half years.  The packing isn't particularly intimidating anymore, but I'm realizing that sometime late next week it will hit me that I've again made a major transition.  So I'm waiting for that to sink in, and handling preparations in the meantime.